The Top Features Of a Ticketing Software

For any business, the key to success is delivering moments of wow to customers. And the key to providing exceptional customer service lies in a good ticketing software. You’d be surprised to know how big an impact ticketing systems have on customer service. From managing customer conversations to gathering feedback, a good tool gives you a complete view of a customer’s engagement with your brand.

But how do you determine if a ticketing software is a good one?

Well, while the capabilities of different tools vary, there are certain features that are a must-have. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top features of a ticketing software that will help your team deliver stellar customer service. The features have been categorized according to the benefits they bring to agents, admins, and customers.

Let’s get started!

Top features of a ticketing software

For agents

The typical day of a support agent is pretty chaotic. Switching between a dozen customer conversations, following up on tickets that are on hold, getting feedback from customers are a few tasks support agents have on their plates every day. These repetitive tasks can bog your team down. To make things easier for them and improve their productivity, here are a few features you need to look for:

Team inbox: In a ticketing system, incoming requests are converted into tickets in the team inbox. A team inbox helps your team resolve issues without getting in each other’s ways. Usually, when agents do not have clarity on whether a question has been answered already, two agents could end up responding to the same question. This confuses your customer as well as leads to duplication of effort. But with a team inbox, agents are aware of the questions that have already been answered thanks to status updates and other properties.

– Ticket views: Combing through tickets every day to pick out the relevant ones can get tiring. With ticket views, agents can simply save tickets that have been assigned to them, tickets that are awaiting a customer response etc. This way, when they start their day, they can jump right into resolving customer issues.

– Customizable ticket forms: Often, agents spend a lot of time collecting information from customers. To avoid these back and forth conversations, agents can customize the ticket form to capture all the details they’d like to collect from the customer in one go.

– Canned forms and responses: Sometimes some responses involve very basic things like sending a ‘thank you’ or ‘we’ll get back to you’ message. Instead of typing out the message or asking the customer the same set of questions over and over again, agents can save them as canned responses or canned forms respectively. Similarly, all messages that are often sent can be saved and inserted into replies with a click of a button.

– Omnichannel experience: Since customers today reach out to brands using different channels of communication, keeping track of all the conversations can get quite challenging. Hence, it’s important for your ticketing system to have an in-built chat and telephony system. This way, requests coming across channels like email, chat, call, and social media are unified in a single platform. If your ticketing software does not have native tools for chat and call, you can integrate it with third-party tools. However, to ensure that your agents don’t spend time switching between tools or scurrying around for context, pick a tool that has native chat and call capabilities.

– Collaboration: Features that allow smooth collaboration in a team or between teams is an integral part of a good ticketing software. Above all, it’s important that your tool lets your agents collaborate with context. Otherwise, agents have to spend time giving a summary of the issue each time they seek help from someone. Along with contextual collaboration, you also need to look features that let you work with other teams to resolve issues without losing visibility of the tickets.

– Chatbots: On an everyday basis, support agents receive a ton of how-to questions which take up most of their time. With a chatbot, agents can focus on more complex tasks while the chatbot answers the how-to questions. Chatbots also provide instant assistance to customers, which is great especially when your team has fixed work hours.

For managers

As a manager, you’d want to keep an eye on your ticketing system to ensure things are running smoothly. Plus, you’d want to set efficient workflows for your team. Let’s take a look at the different features that can help you do this and more:

Analytics – Staying up-to-date with the happenings of your team and the tickets they receive is a practice followed by managers across industries. When you can generate reports using the ticketing tool, monitoring your support becomes very easy. This saves you the hassle of exporting data to another tool to run analytics.

– Dashboard: A bird’s eye view of your team and the tickets they receive goes a long way in team management. A dashboard gives you a clear overview of what is happening in your helpdesk. It helps you keep track of important metrics like the number of tickets that are open, on hold and more along with a snippet of the leaderboard. With a dashboard that’s customizable, you can stay on top of all metrics that matter the most to you and your team.

– Automation: Different customers or agents have different requirements. To accomodate all their requirements, you need the flexibility to set up workflows accordingly. For instance, a customer might require the help of a specific agent whom they are used to interacting with. Instead of manually assigning or reassigning the ticket, you can simply set up an automation rule that routes tickets with specific keywords to the corresponding agents.

Along with workflows, you can automate the entire process of allocating tickets. There are three ways in which you can route tickets:

– By setting thresholds for your agents according to their capacities to handle tickets

– Distributing tickets in a circular fashion

– Routing tickets to agents who are most skilled at handling them.

Security: Businesses of all sizes need to protect their customers’ data and secure their helpdesk. Thus, it is important to look for a tool that comes with inbuilt security features like IP and networks restrictions, identity and access management, data encryption and more.

For customers

The benefits of a ticketing system extend beyond support agents and managers. Your customers too can get instant help from a ticketing software. Here are the features of a ticketing software that make things easy for customers:

– Kowledge base: Most of your customers prefer finding answers on their own as opposed to contacting your team of assistance. This is because in today’s world of instant gratification, customers find self-service easier than sending out long emails or waiting to speak to an agent over the phone. Setting up a self-service portal is easy as most ticketing solutions provide the ability to create a knowledge base. Using the knowledge base, you can create a repository of guides that document your product or service right from your ticketing system.With the self-service portal, customers can find answers by themselves. You can also enable your chatbot on your customer portal.

– Widget:Placing a widget on your website lets your customers reach out to you to receive immediate assistance. For example, when a customer is facing a tough time navigating through the website or is stuck making a payment, they can use the widget to raise a complaint. This request gets recorded as a ticket in your tool which you can later work on.

– Community forums: Fostering an active community has a ton of benefits. It encourages your customers to talk to each other and discuss product ideas and feature requests. This in turn helps your customers learn from one another, leading to an optimal usage of your product or service. To add on, your team can get a better understanding of how your customers think and use this knowledge to improve your customer service.

Conclusion

Picking a ticketing software with top features is a definitive step towards improving customer service. Sign up for Freshdesk, a ticketing software that is designed to help you deliver moments of wow to your customers. The Freshdesk support team will assist you from the time you onboard and will be there to assist you around the clock.